Facebook deploys Microsoft tool to fight child pornography

Facebook is the first company to use a tool from Microsoft that identifies known images of child pornography and remove them from the social network.

The tool, called PhotoDNA, is software that analyzes images for certain characteristics and compares them to images in a reference database. Microsoft calls this process “robust hashing,” and an illicit image’s “hash value” can help authorities track and identify copies – altered or not – of child porn photos. (See video below.)

Microsoft said it has been testing PhotoDNA on Bing, Windows Live Skydrive and Hotmail for more than a year. Now, Facebook is deploying the technology across its entire social network, which has become one of the premier photo-sharing services.

“Facebook will run PhotoDNA against all photos uploaded to the site, to block the distribution of these images of criminal exploitation,” Chris Sonderby, assistant general counsel for Facebook, said in a Microsoft video. “The technology will also better enable us to report these incidents to the National Center (for Missing and Exploited Children) and police, to allow them to take immediate action.”

Apparently, child pornography is a growing issue on Facebook. The social network did not immediately respond to a seattlepi.com request for more information on the topic, but Facebook is planning a press event Friday to discuss child exploitation.

Updated 1 p.m.: A Facebook spokesperson sent the following statement:

Since our founding, Facebook has continually been iterating on its technical systems and investigative techniques to proactively prevent abuse on our site. We view Photo DNA as the next logical step in helping protect children online.

The implementation of this technology was not a response to a specific increase in volume or particular incidents. Instead, it’s the more than 200 million images uploaded to our site daily that gives us the unique opportunity to prevent the further spread of these images & catch more bad guys.

Facebook also said it is required by law to report images of child pornography to the NCMEC, which forwards the incident to the appropriate law enforcement agency. Facebook also works with INTERPOL and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, the spokesperson said.

“PhotoDNA has the power to quickly and accurately identify known child pornography images amongst Facebook’s billions of files shared online,” Bill Harmon, associate general counsel in Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post. “In just one month, Facebook’s services host more than 30 billion pieces of shared content, including photos, Web links, news stories, blog posts and more. Identifying graphic child pornography in a sea of content like that is a daunting task, but PhotoDNA is helping to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

Child pornography had been nearly eradicated in the 1980s, NCMEC CEO Ernie Allen said. But the advent of the Internet opened up a new way – an easier, safer and more anonymous way – to transmit and share illegal content.

Allen

In 2009, Microsoft donated PhotoDNA to the NCMEC, which reviews thousands of images per week and assigns PhotoDNA signatures to known images of child abuse. The center then shares the signatures with Microsoft and services such as Facebook, which can then find illegal images and delete them.

“Since 2002, we have reviewed and analyzed almost 49 million photos and videos of child pornography, including well more than 13 million in 2010 alone,” Allen wrote in a blog post today. “The victims in these images have progressively been getting younger as pedophiles prey on pre-verbal children who cannot ask for help. Of the more than 3,500 children depicted in commonly traded images who have been identified by law enforcement, 10 percent are infants and toddlers and 67 percent are prepubescent.”

PhotoDNA was created by Microsoft Research and further developed by a Dartmouth College computer science professor. Microsoft hopes Facebook’s adoption of the tool will encourage more companies to use PhotoDNA. Law enforcement agencies already are able to download the tool from the NCMEC.

“If I laid down in front of you a couple of billion images and ask you to hand me the ones that are inappropriate, you can imagine the scope of that problem,” Dartmouth professor Hany Farid said in December 2009. “And so we have been developing technology that can pluck out those inappropriate images from a sea of billions in a very fast, very reliable way.”

Here’s a video from Microsoft about the partnership with Facebook and the NCMEC: